[1]The president spent an hour last week giving a speech detailing yet another jobs program. During the last election cycle we were promised a new era of green jobs facilitated by the hand of government. Now it’s “infrastructure,” he says. That’s where the jobs are!

Obama’s been talking about infrastructure for six years now and so far it’s been all hat and no cattle. And I’m not sure where all those green jobs are, especially if the Chinese keep putting out cut rate solar panels and companies like Solyndra keep going bankrupt.

But if the president really wants to stimulate job growth he may want to think long and hard about all the jobs his war against coal has cost us.

I’ll be the first to admit that coal has environmental drawbacks. It needs to be regulated and its environmental impacts mitigated. But how fast, how soon? In the deepest and longest lasting recession since the Great Depression, should the federal government be declaring war on any industry?

What rankles me the most, however, is that the EPA, under the president’s direct control, doesn’t give a hoot about job loss. This report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce [8]details how for 45 years, the EPA has turned a blind eye to the human cost of job losses resulting from its regulations.

If Congress can’t get accurate data about the damage federal regulations are doing to jobs in this country it can’t do cost-benefit analysis.

According to the report, in 1967 Congress required the EPA to provide “a comprehensive study of the economic impacts of air quality standards on the nation’s industries and communities.” Yet a decade later when this mandate was coded into law the EPA, “ignored this congressional mandate, thus depriving Congress of a significant body of data that would shed light on the impact of regulations on jobs and employment.”

Then again in 2009, when six Senators asked the EPA for an evaluation of additional job losses due to air quality regulations, the EPA responded, more or less, by saying: “Hey, not my job.”

It seems the least the president could do, if he were serious about jobs, would be to call his own agency on the carpet about its refusal to calculate the jobs lost due to federal regulations. If Congress can’t get accurate data about the damage federal regulations are doing to jobs in this country it can’t do cost-benefit analysis. Bad information, bad solutions. No information, no solutions.

A business that can’t or won’t do cost-benefit analysis won’t last a year. Amazing that a government can go on for 45 years without honoring this basic operating procedure.

In 2010 we reported on the California Air Quality Board’s absurdly incorrect numbers on the amount of pollution diesel construction machines put into that state’s air. They overestimated the amount by a factor of three to four times.[9] Nobody at CARB got fired, as is the case with most government agencies, even though hundreds of contractors had to upgrade or sell off their fleets at a loss.

There are dozens of government agencies that put out detailed numbers, highly respected and bankable information. Why can’t the EPA do the same?

Is it the case that environmental agencies are afraid to show us the math, knowing that accurate numbers would doom their pet causes?

[2] are going to eliminate 887,700 jobs and bring compliance costs nationwide to the tune of $15 to $16.7 billion.: http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/26/report-epa-regulations-could-mean-887000-jobs-lost-per-year/